Our future, if we have one

One of the top memes among local media and blogging circles the past week has been, not surprisingly, the fate of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The paper is up for sale. If it doesn’t sell — and no one really expects it to — owner Hearst Corp. plans to end the print edition and perhaps shut down the P-I completely. Hearst is considering the possibility of continuing SeattlePI.com as a digital-only concern but that’s far from a done deal.

What happens next is anybody’s guess — but everybody online seems to have an opinion, or a wistful memory of the doomed P-I newspaper, or a plan on how to save at least the Web site. It has all made for some fascinating discussion about journalism’s present and future.

Dylan Willbanks posted a three-part series (1 | 2 | 3) that perceptively assesses the current situation and the likely futures.

We Media’s Brian Reich wrote a three-part series (a two-part series on his plan for saving the P-I.

On a related note, Chuck Taylor, late of Crosscut, chimes in with a related series of posts exploring the far-from-implausible notion that Seattle could become a “zero-newspaper town” in the near future (1 | 2 | 3 | 4).

Clark Humphrey, at MISCmedia.com, has been doing a great job of both rounding up links on the topic and of offering level-headed analysis like this:

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the constant search for Truth has to be subsidized by the purveyors of subdivision homes and used cars. Nor did the ancient Greek gods proclaim that investigative reporting need be in the same package as recipes, box scores, and comic strips.

The American newspaper as we’ve known it since the 1950s is not really what we’re trying to save.

What we’re trying to preserve and strengthen is local news coverage.

It’s just that a workable 21st century business model has yet to magically appear that would support teams of full-time professional journalists.